The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash
by Saranacian Freak
Summary: My attempt at a sixth book.
1. 1

WHEN A PLANET IS DESTROYED AT ALL POINTS ALONG ITS PROBABILITY AXIS, IT CEASES TO EXIST.  
  
BUT IF AN ELEMENT OF IMPROBABILITY IS INTRODUCED, STRANGE THINGS CAN HAPPEN.   
  
At the very moment that the planet Earth was destroyed along its entire probability axis, an element of improbability appeared at the center. Somewhere in a restaurant called Stavro Mueller's, the room flickered around Arthur and went dark.  
  
"What's going on?" he asked with his typical genius for the obvious. Ford, across the room, opened his mouth to answer, and was suddenly inexplicably twisted away into the shape of a very disgruntled wombat.  
  
"Ford, what are you doing?" demanded Arthur as he and Ford were illuminated with a particularly unpleasant glowing orange color, noticing that he himself was beginning to feel rather uncomfortably similar to a bowling ball.  
  
"It's the Improbability Drive!" Ford yelled as best he could through a wombat's mouth. Arthur was beginning to feel an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu.  
  
"Not again," he mumbled, suddenly feeling his first twinge of sympathy for Agrajag as his body was suddenly hurled by invisible hands toward a neat triangle of bowling pins. He shrieked as his ribs crashed into them and they became ten fierce lemmings on impact, gnawing viciously at Arthur, who had inconveniently ceased to be a bowling ball and was now in serious danger of having his purple shrimp-shaped fingers removed.  
  
Trillian and Random were similarly encumbered, albeit by hedgehogs, as they followed Ford and Arthur in spinning through an infinite black void that was occasionally illuminated with glowing bits of purple and green paisely cloth fluttering about randomly.  
  
Suddenly everything spun away into the void, ceasing to take Arthur, Ford, Trillian, and Random with it. Their eyes were temporarily blinded by a hideous white light, and as it dimmed, they looked around them, blinking in amazement, at a sight most of them knew well: the bridge of the Heart of Gold.  
  
"Zaphod?" Ford asked, for once more confused than Arthur. "But the Golden Bail..."  
  
"Yeah? It's powering this ship," said Zaphod cooly. "What of it?"  
  
"But wasn't it destroyed," put in Arthur, "When the robots of Krikkit put it into the Wikkit keyhole?"  
  
"Who ever said anything about it being destroyed?" demanded one of Zaphod's heads testily. The other was busy with a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.  
  
"I thought it melted," said Arthur lamely.  
  
"No, little monkey," Zaphod informed him loftily, "it didn't melt, because I stole it."  
  
"You stole it." Ford said flatly, looking at his cousin with an expression that somehow managed to exactly convey an extreme lack of surprise.  
  
"What did you expect?" said Arthur. "He stole it once, why wouldn't he-"  
  
"Oh, shut up, all of you!" yelled Random. She was already recovering from the incident at Stavro Mueller's, though she still trembled periodically. "Why are we here?"  
  
"Because. I saved your bums, baby," said Zaphod, exploring the subtle nuances of his drink with his agonized taste buds. In fact they were about as subtle as a conversation punctuated by several vicious slams to the head with a sledgehammer, but this particular tongue of Zaphod's had already been through several such experiences and was now nearly as corroded as that particular throat.  
  
Trillian, with as much dignity as possible, picked herself up from the floor and walked over to study the computer screen Zaphod's left head seemed intently interested in. She peered just as intently at the moving figures, realized Zaphod was just playing Pac-Man, and took a seat in the chair next to him.  
  
"So how ya been, baby?" his right head asked nonchalantly, gazing somewhere off to her left as it began to feel the effects of the Gargle Blaster.  
  
"Just great," she snarled. "In the past few months, I've missed an excellent job opportunity because I was missing my contacts, been kidnapped by insane aliens who dragged me off to a planet beyond Pluto, which was called Rupert, for no appartent reason except that they had no sense of personal purpose, and, let's see, what else? If I'm not mistaken, my home planet was just destroyed by Vogons. How's it hanging your way?"  
  
"Not too bad. How are you, Ford?" Zaphod said calmly.  
  
"All right, considering," Ford replied, looking distractedly about the bridge and noticing several new chandeliers and a neon green splatter pattern on the walls. "I like what you've done in here."  
  
"Done? Oh, yes. That. Well," Zaphod said, "I didn't. The Heart of Gold did."  
  
"Ah," said Ford.  
  
"So where are we going?" said Arthur, beginning to have the distinct impression that it wasn't anyplace he'd like.  
  
"I have no idea," Zaphod's left head said candidly, glancing up briefly from an intense round of Pac-Man. "We've just been wandering the universe for several years. Stopping and drinking here and there, picking up the occasional knick-knack. That down there," he gestured down a corridor, "is a nice little ship I stole. Runs smoother than-"  
  
"We?" interjected Arthur.  
  
"Yeah, we," said Zaphod. "Me, Eddie, and that cute little guy over there in the corner."  
  
Arthur turned slowly, wondering exactly what he expected to see, and beheld a tiny, round, and obnoxiously cheerful robot.   
  
"Oh,"said Ford, attatching more gravity to the word than it is normally given. "Colin," he added in the manner of a man who has just been slapped in the face continuously with a catfish for 36 hours and has just found out that it is going to happen again.  
  
"And boy am I glad to see you!" Colin burbled, hovering closer to Ford's head, still annoyingly out of reach.  
  
"That's interesting," Ford snapped, guiltily remembering how he'd abandoned the innocent robot to its fate. Ah, well, he reasoned, it wasn't as if anything had actually happened to him. He decided to question the little robot later and turned to arguing with Zaphod about where they were going. Zaphod opted for the nearest bar, but Ford was vitally interested in putting as much distance as possible between himself and whatever remained of the Guide's offices. Eventually Zaphod persuaded him that the disgruntled grey Vogons had no idea that he even existed and that they ought to go get a drink, which was secretly what Ford wanted in the first place.  
  
Arthur lounged boredly across the room while all this was going on, attempting to create a meaningful relationship with Random. All previous attempts to do so had failed miserably, but the stubborn man had not yet given up hope. He slouched calmly in his tattered dressing gown, which he had unfortunately put on again before leaving Earth, picking at a loose thread on the armrest as he attempted to discuss the Golden Bail which powered the ship they were now riding in with her. Eventually he gave up, mostly because she stopped fiddling with his copy of the original Guide, slammed it onto the desk next to him, and stormed off in search of a bathroom.  
  
"That went well," Arthur mumbled, picking up the Guide and searching with great curiosity for the entry on Earth. He was unsurprised and more than a little annoyed when an error message came up, informing him that this particular entry was being updated and would be visible in a few minutes. He instead turned indifferently to an article on an indiginous breed of Jartrignian earthworms.  
  
Jartrignian earthworms (the Guide read) are one of the most disgusting creatures imaginable. As soon as the young are born, the mother eats over half-  
  
Arthur snapped the cover shut in disgust and flung the electronic book across the room, where it made a satisfying crunch against the wall and dropped to the floor.  
  
"Hey there, how's it going?" Colin asked, having finally abandoned his euphoric attempts at conversation with Ford Prefect, who had been discovering the nuances of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters for himself and was therefore quite laconic.  
  
"What do you want?" Arthur snarled, digging his hand deeply into the pocket of his dressing gown. He sensed that something had been there not so long ago, but whatever it was had since fallen out through a little hole he had neglected to notice. All that was left now was a large piece of uninspiring grey lint and an object Arthur's aunt had given him years ago for his birthday. No matter how long Arthur pondered the object, he had never been able to divine exactly what it was.  
  
He took it out and examined it now, attempting to ignore Colin's joyous advances. The object was about three inches in length, and of a uniform greyish-pink color all around. It was rather oddly shaped, but had no electronic components or anything else that could define itself as interesting, even in Arthur's dull mind. He tossed it up in the air a few times, as if testing the weight, then snatched it before Colin could say something cheerful about it and dropped it back into his pocket, where it lay in a manner remarkably similar to that of a dead mouse.  
  
"I just want to be your friend, and make you happier and happier and-"  
  
"Zark off," Arthur said. He remembered having heard the phrase from a disgruntled man who had recieved a Rory for the most gratuitous use of the word Belgium in a serious screenplay, and also remembered having heard it from Zaphod before that, and was now finding it quite useful.  
  
"What's that?" Colin asked smugly.  
  
"I SAID, ZARK OFF!" Arthur shouted, fervently wishing he had kept the Guide in his hand so he could now throw it at Colin instead.  
  
"With pleasure!" Colin said unbearably and did the aerial equivalent of skipping off down the nearest hallway.  
  
"Gets to you after a while, doesn't he, Arthur?" said Ford imperturbably.  
  
"Just a little," Arthur grumbled, hunching down in his seat again.  
  
"Let's go for a walk," said Ford.  
  
"Why?" said Arthur.  
  
"It's either that or sit around listening to me and Zaphod argue. And if we walk, it'll be harder for Colin to find us and be nice to us again."  
  
"All very true," said Arthur, and followed him. When they were deep in the bowels of the Heart of Gold, Ford spoke.  
  
"That's why I tried to kill him."  
  
"What?" said Arthur predictably, blinking a great deal more than his friend.  
  
"That," Ford said, with more patience than he was wont to use, "is why I tried to kill him."  
  
"I think I'm missing something here," said Arthur slowly. Ford was getting the distinct impression that this had happened before when he had tried to explain things to Arthur.  
  
"The fact that he is annoying...is...the reason...I tried to kill him. Actually I didn't physically do anything to him, Arthur," said Ford, ducking to avoid bashing his head on a particularly low ceiling support. "It was more of a command, really."  
  
"Ah."  
  
"But I did tell him he would probably die," Ford added quickly, before the man in the tattered bathrobe could come to any conclusions.  
  
"Ah," said Arthur again, this time slightly more expressively.  
  
"If you want to know, I sent him up a mail chute with the Hitchhiker's Guide Mark Two. You know, that hideously annoying, more than somewhat evil bird thing?"  
  
"Oh, that," said Arthur, as if he had found the Guide Mark Two on the bottom of his shoe recently and been more than slightly offended by its smell.  
  
"Yes. I told him he'd probably be incinerated," Ford confided, supressing a giggle rather badly, "or tortured or something. I'm extremely surprised that he survived, and rather devilishly curious as to why, though I suppose he was just nice to the Vogons. Nasty creatures, Vogons," he murmured, "couldn't imagine them putting up with robots being nice to them. They would probably have just tried to read him some of their poetry. Though you'd be able to tell if they had, you know. Not even a manic robot can put up with that drivel for very long." He and Arthur shuddered as they pondered seperate but very similarly horrifying memories of the last Vogon poetry reading they had mutually and involuntarily attended.  
  
"So why does Zaphod have him?" Arthur asked after a while.  
  
"That's what I've been trying to ask him," said Ford, "but every time I mention it he starts off on another argument about which bar we should go to, or tells me to go discuss it with my pet monkey-"  
  
"Your pet monkey?" Arthur said indignantly. He was used to Zaphod being rude by now, but this was a new depth of Zaphod's lack of couth to which Arthur had not previously had the displeasure of being exposed. Ford shrugged.  
  
"Shall we be heading back now?" he asked.  
  
"You think I want to stay here with Zaphod and go to whatever bar suits his fancy, watch him steal whatever ship he currently covets at the time, wander the universe at random until I die, Ford? Haven't you ever thought there's more to life?" Arthur demanded, stopping in mid-stride and causing Ford to narrowly miss another ceiling support.  
  
"Not particularly," Ford said infuriatingly, "although I wouldn't mind doing most of those things. Without Zaphod. In fact I think I'd enjoy it more that way." Arthur glared at him malevolantly, thinking of how fun it would be to stab him viciously with a sharpened butterknife and leave him to be read poetry at by Vogons.   
  
"Ow! Fardwarks!" Ford added a minute later, upon bashing his head on a rafter. "Zarking short little Damograns, can't learn to build a ship properly..."  
  
"Ford, what's the point?" Arthur asked. Ford did something he rarely did, which was to blink, and said "Of complaining about the Damograns? I don't know, it's nice to blame your pain on someone else, you know, and-"  
  
"No, not that. I meant of life," Arthur said.  
  
"By the way," said Ford, "What ever happened to Marvin?"  
  
"That," said Arthur morosely, "is an extremely long story. I'm sure I'll have plenty of time to tell you all about it, but for now..." his voice trailed off into nothing, and Ford stared in amazement as he saw Arthur begin to do something he'd never seen him do before, which was to hunch over into a peculiar shape and cry. Ford was quite alarmed, as people from his planet only cried in times of extreme grief or emergency, or, in the case of the women, when they wanted something, which was far more often than the frequency with which the men cried. So. In short, Ford was more than somewhat startled.  
  
"What's wrong?" he asked, with more concern in his voice than Arthur had ever heard.  
  
"What do you mean, what's wrong, you blithering idiot?" snarled Arthur. "For so many years I have lost count, I have been wandering around with a bunch of insane aliens (here Ford stiffened somewhat) who have nothing better to do than zip off to the nearest bar until they get bored and go in search of the next one! I have also seen my planet destroyed more times than I care to recall-"  
  
"Two," inserted Ford helpfully, and was silenced by a withering glare.  
  
"SHUT UP!" Arthur said, looking, for the first time in his life, extremely dangerous. "I have attempted to assist a very strange old man with a very strange name in saving a universe in which I take absolutely no pleasure in living in...wait...is that how you'd say that?" Arthur became lost in his own grammatical intricacies and mumbled disconsolantly to himself as Ford laid an arm comfortingly around his shoulder, assisting him in ducking under the obnoxiously low white rafters.  
  
Eventually Arthur's sobs slowed to an intermittent hiccup, and they found themselves near the galley, or kitchen, as Arthur would have it. Ford suggested that they drop in for a bit of tea, which sent Arthur into another diatribe, this one containing several unprintable facts Arthur wished to make clear upon the subject of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Ford managed to calm him down enough that he sat cross-armed in a high-backed wooden chair, bemoaning the general state of the universe as Ford searched the cupboards in vain for a teacup.  
  
Part of the problem with these particular cupboards containing teacups (or, more concisely, not containing them) was that it was a fully automated galley. This could be quite pleasant for lazy bachelors like Zaphod, whose heads enjoyed eating far more than his three arms enjoyed doing dishes. In fact, Zaphod had never touched a bottle of dish soap, or any kind of soap for that matter, in his life. Zaphod's tendency to stock the ship with fairly useless, breathtakingly expenisve items also manifested itself to Ford and Arthur.  
  
"Look at this," said Ford quietly, carrying a small black object over to Arthur's hopeless form.  
  
"I don't want to see any more of Zaphod's useless Sirius Cybernetics-"  
  
"This one might actually be helpful, Arthur," said Ford, fidlding with several of the buttons along the black thing's base. He found a large, red one which flipped it open, displaying a small screen.  
  
"Is that another Hitchhiker's Guide? Because if it is-"  
  
"No, no, Arthur!" Ford said excitedly, restraining Arthur's upraised fist with surprising difficulty. The long nights of rock-lifting on prehistoric Earth, and Arthur's far more recent escapades with Fenchurch had built an amazing amount of muscle. "Watch this!" He tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and on the small greyish pad in front of the screen appeared a small piece of chocolate.  
  
"Can it do tea?" Arthur asked, suddenly immensely interested. Ford tapped a few keys, and a small brownish bag appeared.  
  
"It's American tea," said Ford, tapping a few more keys. He got only another bag of the same material. "It'll have to do, though." He produced, in rapid succession, milk, sugar, and a little pink porcelain frog with a disturbing pour spout in the rear, out of which cream came when the frog was tipped.  
  
"Ford..."  
  
"No, I didn't ask for it to come out of a pink frog's bum, Arthur," Ford said disgustedly. "Don't be ridiculous."  
  
"That is probably," said Arthur, as he sipped his tea with obvious relish, "Zaphod's fault."  
  
"Most things are, actually, if you trace them back far enough," Ford said amiably as he set to work getting a very large mug of Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.  
  
"I don't think you need any more of those," said Arthur quietly, staring into the depths of his cup.  
  
"Of course I do."  
  
After a surprisingly long amount of time went by in this manner, when Ford had become satisfactorily intoxicated, Arthur announced that he was tired.  
  
"It's that tea," Ford said, trying to wriggle his eyebrows superiorly at Arthur and missing him by about six feet. "Caffeine is nothing compared to this stuff." He waved a hand in the general direction of his Gargle Blaster and succeeded in knocking it off the table and into his lap. He shoved the mug off onto the floor and got shakily to his feet, swaying like an enraged bumblebee.  
  
"Are you coming?" he demanded, lurching off down the corridor haphazardly. Arthur ran to catch him, saving him just in time from bashing his head on another of the Damogran ceiling supports.  
  
"Thanks, Arthur," he said tipsily, swaying off in the general direction of his old bunk. Arthur followed him nervously, stopping him from hitting a wall here, a rafter there, and a door everywhere else. Eventually he managed to tuck Ford away into his bunk from the old days before the Earth had really been destroyed.  
  
"'Night, Arthur," said Ford, as his old friend pulled the covers up to his chin. "Do you remember..."  
  
Arthur patiently waited for Ford to finish his sentence, realized he was asleep, and collapsed onto his own bed to dream of days gone by. 


	2. 2

Fenchurch fell through a black vast void. She worried. She also spun a great deal.  
  
Eventually she landed on something which surprised her by being soft and got to her feet. She loked around and found that she had landed in a huge pile of stuff that looked unnervingly like pink insulation or cotton candy. She stepped forward, found it quite springy, and bounced off toward the horizon.  
  
Two hours later, she hadn't found anything worth mentioning, and sat down by the side of a stream, whose water, she found, left quite a bit to be desired. She was very aware of the fact that her tender and long-unused feet had been touching the ground ever since she had landed. She winced as she rubbed at a blister, decided to carry her shoes for a while, and stood up to continue walking.  
  
After quite some time she found a small, eerie forest, hung with something a bit like Spanish moss and much more unnervingly like carnivorous vines. She examined the "teeth" of the plants, decided she didn't like the look of them, and continued on her way.  
  
It had been approximately five hours since the SlumpJet had suddenly blurred away into oblivion and she had lost Arthur, and she wondered idly where he was and what was happening to him. She didn't know it, but he was at least as unhappy as she was. At that moment he was sitting in a miserable hotel room on a miserable planet called NowWhat, thinking miserable thoughts, most of them about her (or more concisely, the lack of her), and some small beasts that wanted to eat his leg. She sighed and began to search, futilely, for food.  
  
Arthur sat, extremely bored, in the bridge of the Heart of Gold, scrolling through a list of figures related to the probability of NutriMatics actually producing tea. He sighed, for so far the figures were disenhearteningly low, and scuffed off in his slippers to find Ford (or possibly somone else more interesting, such as Trillian). Anything was better than staying here with Eddie.  
  
Eddie had been experiencing personality problems as of late. For example, there was the day he decided he was a Hungarian Fruit Fly and attempted to flit about the cabin. This was quite impossible due to his size and weight and especially to the fact that he was bolted to the wall, but despite this and Zaphod's useless insistence that Eddie was in fact a computer, he insisted on continuing. These problems caused further problems, not the least of which was that Zaphod had drunk himself into a stupor and was now lying on the floor, staring cross-eyed at the ceiling and murmuring something about the fact that he had only two heads, while Eccentrica Gallumbits (the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6) had (what the narrator hopes is obviously) three breasts, and if you could follow that sentence, you're more deranged than I am.  
  
Arthur (and most of the other passengers) did not view this as a problem (as such), because things were generally a whole lot saner without Zaphod. Eddie was, under normal circumstances, able to handle these things by putting the ship under auto pilot, but these were not normal circumstances, and by the point his Swedish Grandmother Who Has Just Snorted Several Pixy Stix stage rolled around, the ship was already (unbeknownst even to Eddie) hurtling at a dangerously fast speed toward a small, barren, and generally uninteresting planet known (for reasons known, important, and interesting only to its sole native) as Bert. This, typically, failed to worry Arthur, mainly because he didn't notice.  
  
As the ship neared the small, boring planet of Bert, Arthur was far away from Zaphod and Eddy, scuffing down a dim, narrow passageway in search of the ship's more intelligent life. Trillian resolutely refused to appear in any of the places in which Arthur looked, and he eventually found himself back in the sleeping quarters he shared with Ford. They shared only the room - they had seperate hammocks. Get your minds out of the gutter.  
  
Suddenly Ford looked up from the Hitchhiker's Guide, in which he was reading a very odd passage on the Quantabulan Ordinary Wambleplatchett, because Arthur Dent was standing in front of him. He wrestled with the idea of returning to the Wambleplatchett, because it was much more interesting, but Arthur's face looked so lonely he set the Guide down and decided another of Arthur's lame excuses for conversation would be tolerable enough to warrant it.  
  
Meanwhile Zaphod's left head had found a dusty party horn under the desk. He examined it with as much interest as possible considering how many Gargle Blasters he'd just had and stuck it into his left mouth, from whence the paper portion of the horn shot out and slapped loudly into the right head's ear. "Hey," it protested drunkenly (the head, that is, not the party horn).  
  
"What do YOU want?" asked the left head, loudly blowing the horn again in close proximity to the offended ear. "This is kinda fun," he added.  
  
"Shu'p and leave me alone, I hav' a ter'ble headache."  
  
"No, I like it!"  
  
"I don't!"  
  
"Nobody asked you," said the left head, again making the offending noise.  
  
"I SAID SHU'P!"  
  
"I SAID NO!"  
  
"I BLEW IN IT!" yelled the right head in an obnoxious, self-satisfied manner, utterly failing to make one of Zaphod's arms tear the party horn away from his left mouth.  
  
"So?" demanded Zaphod's left head, slapping the reaching hand.  
  
"OW! STOP IT!"  
  
"Hey, watch this!" announced the left head (these were often famous (or near-famous) last (or near-last) words (often the last word was along the lines of "AAAAAAUUUGGGH!" or "Don't put the fireworks in the coffee machine, Uncle Charlie!" (although strictly and literally speaking Zaphod had no Uncle Charlie)), and had been so for Zaphod the last three times he'd attempted to show off and ended up nearly dying), tearing the paper part off the horn. The preposterous head then proceeded to concentrate all the power of its lung (or lungs, the narrator refuses to speculate on this) into the horn. The horn made a sound remarkably similar to a dying Wambleplatchett, and the noisemaking element in the end buried itself deep in the right head's ear.  
  
"LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE NOW, YOU STUPID-"  
  
Suddenly Zaphod's right head's screams were broken off by Eddie, who said, on the speakers all over the ship, in a fake Scandinavian accent, six very alarming words.   
  
It is a major problem in most of the universe that authors often keep their readers in suspense, causing a lot of further complications (not the least of which involve suicide, heart attacks, obstructed nasal passages, and sewing needles, but we'll get to that later). I would therefore like to tell you right up front that nothing especially dangerous is going to happen. I might kill off some minor character or other if I'm in the mood, but it will most likely not be anyone that is generally liked. Also, Bert's resident is not immediately damaged in any physical or metaphysical sense, because he's going to be busy fishing elsewhere on the planet.  
  
The words Eddie said were these: "We're going to crash on Bert."  
  
"Huh?" said Arthur.  
  
"Oh st," said Ford, which was actually what Arthur would have said in about five more seconds.  
  
"Who's Bert?" said Arthur.  
  
"It's not a question of who," said Ford cryptically, "it's a question of when."  
  
Arthur paused for several minutes, appearing to take all this in, nodding slowly as he did so.  
  
"What?"  
  
There was a terrible, ghastly noise.  
  
There was a terrible, ghastly silence.  
  
There was a terrible, ghastly noise.  
  
Arthur began to feel intense deja vu.  
  
"Ford?"  
  
"MMMmmmmph."  
  
"Ford, where are you? Are you all right?"  
  
"Umph uff umph uff yumph farmphng foomph..."  
  
"What?" Arthur shifted his weight to the other foot.  
  
"Yeah, now that you got your farking foot off my face!"  
  
"Sorry, Ford."  
  
"I'm sure."  
  
"Where are we?" Arthur asked brilliantly.  
  
"BERT!" Ford stormed out, shoving his copy of the Guide deeply into his satchel as he went. Arthur wondered, as he had wondered many times when conversing with Ford, if it was something special he did, or if it was just that the Universe was toying with his mind and somewhere a man who lived with a cat and a pencil was arguing with himself about whether Arthur in fact existed. He remembered rather uneasily the maniacal laughter he had caused Prak and decided to stay true to his English heritage and try not to think about it.  
  
"So I was like, OH! MY! GOSH! And did you, like, hear what he, like, SAID about going out with her? Like, OH, my GOSH!"   
  
The squealing teenage voice filled the cabin of the Heart of Gold, reverberating off every available surface and coming down on Zaphod's heads like a ton of something with which it is very unpleasant to be beaned. Zaphod was uncomfortably reminded of his sister, Ytzpratel.  
  
"Hey?" he said experimentally.  
  
"Like, what?"  
  
"Eddie! SHUT UP!" Zaphod smiled slightly at the silence, then asked, "Where are we?"  
  
Eddie was silent.  
  
"Where are we, Eddie?"  
  
More silence.  
  
"I still have that axe."  
  
"Bert," Eddie said sullenly, all resemblance to Ytzpratel suddenly gone.  
  
"And...that would be where?" Zaphod said, pretending to use the last ounce of his patience on Eddie. In reality, Zaphod never posessed any patience, but he enjoyed acting.  
  
Eddie dutifully spewed out some coordinates, which meant little to Zaphod, whose heads were still reeling from the Gargle Blasters (though somewhere, they stirred a dark and uneasy memory within him).   
  
"Plural J Epsilon," Zaphod repeated quietly. "Well. And how's it going with the ship?"  
  
"It isn't," said Eddie.  
  
"Come again?"  
  
"The ship," said Eddie in a very Belgian manner, "has stopped."  
  
"And...is it likely to start again anytime soon?"  
  
"No, it's not working."  
  
"Great. Just great. I'm stuck on a planet I've never heard of with a computer that thinks it's...whatever random ethnicity suits it at the time, my useless cousin, a hot chick I can't get and her daughter who hates me, and a primitive ape from a planet that should have taken him with it."  
  
"But Random doesn't like anybody," Eddie pointed out helpfully.  
  
"Shut up," Zaphod suggested.  
  
Colin hovered, humming slightly, in a disused hallway of the Heart of Gold. He was fairly happy about the ship crashing; after all, he hadn't been expecting anything remotely interesting to happen that day. Maybe he could find a new friend on the planet, apparently called Bert (according to the announcement Eddie's Scandinavian accent had made several minutes before). He sighed with glee and flitted off down the corridor to find someone to annoy.  
  
As Arthur stepped outside the ship beside his friend Ford, he shivered involuntarily. It wasn't that the planet was cold. It was an incredibly humid, opressive atmosphere, and it reminded Arthur of walking into a greenhouse. It wasn't that he was afraid. He'd been on enough journeys with Ford to know better. Ford seemed to be able to get out of anything, and usually managed to get Arthur out of it too (Arthur's fight with Thor being the main exception). No, that wasn't it either. The planet was a hideous, bold shade of green, with a purple-tinted sky and some of the most hideous trees (or maybe they were just rock formations, but Arthur preferred to think of them as trees, because he didn't want to think about it if they weren't, although they appeared to be blinking at him) Arthur had ever encountered. That wasn't it either.  
  
There was a tall, thin man standing on the ugly sand before him. He had long, grey hair, which looked as if had been raked rather than combed back away from his face, and black, sunken, hopeless eyes. On the man's shoulder was a very large, very black bird with a curved beak that suggested (rather unpleasantly, to Arthur) a sudden carnivorous fury, though none was forthcoming. In fact the bird just sat blinking at Arthur hungrily.  
  
That was it.  
  
"Er," said Arthur expressively, as he was wont to do on such occasions. "Um," he added, by way of expanding his remarks.  
  
Ford wisely decided to take over the talking. "Hi," he said. The man stared at him as if forbidding further speech. "I'm Ford," Ford added after a moment's silence.  
  
"...", said the man with the bird on his shoulder.  
  
"Our, um, our ship crashed," Arthur said, trying to sound friendly and failing miserably at it.  
  
"I see that," said the man in a voice that made Ford want to hide under the nearest available object.  
  
"Ford, get away from my shoes, you can't have them," said Arthur calmly. Ford slowly stood again.  
  
"So," said Ford, in a voice that was intended to convey that he was a very confident person who had not just attempted to hide under his best friend's foot, "Do you have a house?"  
  
"No," said the man slowly. "I have a cave."  
  
Arthur finally felt some breed of cameraderie growing within him, and didn't know if he liked it.  
  
"That's nice," said Ford. "Listen, could you, uh...for money, I mean...um, what I mean is, can you feed us?"  
  
"What kind of money?" asked the man.  
  
"Uh..."  
  
"Ask Zaphod for some," said Arthur to Ford. The man stood up as if electrified. "Did he just say Zaphod?" he demanded of Ford.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"As in, Zaphod Beeblebrox?"  
  
"Well, yeah..." Ford said slowly, beginning to wonder if this was a good thing.  
  
"WHERE IS HE???" the old man roared, his previously dead eyes seeming to glow with rage. He leapt forward, the bird flying off his shoulder toward the ship. Ford grabbed the shoulder of Arthur's gown (which tore apart) and shoved him over backward into the ship. He rolled in over the sill himself and quickly shut and sealed the door.  
  
"Ouch! You bruised my back! What was that all about, anyways?" Arthur complained, standing up and dusting off what little remained of his torn dressing gown.  
  
"I didn't push you that hard. I don't know what's going on," said Ford, his face white as a Robot of Krikkit, "but I wasn't sticking around to find out. Let's get out of here." He stomped off down the hall toward the cabin to yell at Zaphod.  
  
"Hi!" said Colin, bouncing up and down outside Random's door.  
  
"Go away," Random mumbled, intent on something that was apparently happening on her wrist.  
  
"Are you sure?" said Colin. "I could keep you company! Or we could watch something!" he gestured toward a tall cabinet full of Damogran movies, which did Random absolutely no good since they were in Damogran and had, at best, subtitles in Danqueddian, in which Random was unfortunately not fluent.  
  
"Those movies suck. I hate movies, anyway. I hate everything...Hey! Didn't I tell you to go away?"  
  
"Yeah," said Colin, shuffling nervously and oozing euphoria at her. "I'm bored, which is a wonderful way to feel, and-"  
  
"Go be bored somewhere else."  
  
"But-"  
  
"ZARK OFF!" A well-aimed shoe sailed toward Colin. PING! A small door opened on his side. As the shoe completed its flight and began to react to the extreme gravity of Bert, something incredibly improbable happened. The shoelace wrapped partway around a small bit of metal - a wire, in fact - and pulled it loose.  
  
"You make me angry," said Colin unexpectedly, and left.  
  
"WHY CAN'T WE LEAVE?" Ford was screaming at approximately the same time.  
  
"The ship isn't working," said Eddie calmly in a high-pitched wail.  
  
"I don't want to hear this kind of thing. This," said Zaphod, "is precisely the kind of thing that I don't want to hear. What's the matter with the ship?" he demanded, ducking Ford's hand, which was attempting to choke one of his heads.  
  
"Something has ruptured," said Eddie uselessly.  
  
"Any particular something?" demanded Ford.  
  
"Something," said Eddie, "in the engine room."  
  
"Wow. That's useful," Zaphod muttered, leaning back away from Ford, who was still trying to do something unpleasant involving his neck.  
  
"Listen," said Ford, finally getting ahold of Zaphod's collar and twisting it, "you don't happen to know a tall, thin man who looks like Death's little brother and goes around with a vicious-looking carnivorous bird on his shoulder, do you, Zaph?"  
  
Zaphod's faces turned several interesting colors.  
  
"Ah, not exactly, not know as such, no..." he looked down nervously at Ford's other arm, which was trying to find something in his pocket. This was soon clarified as Ford removed a small bag of very stale Lazputian Prangs (the very disgusting dried fruit of the Prangoid tree of Lazputia, which no one in their right mind would eat or even carry, because they give off a horrible smell. However, it was a well-known fact, especially to Zaphod, that Ford wasn't in his right mind and never had been). Ford began to eat the Prangs, pretending to enjoy them immensely, though in fact they tasted (if Ford had known it) remarkably like a skunk.  
  
"Hungry?" said Ford.  
  
"Not now," said Zaphod.  
  
"Zarquon," murmured Ford, "I was hoping to use that as leverage. So anyways, this creepy, tall guy."  
  
"What creepy tall guy?"  
  
"The one," said Ford patiently, "who is inhabiting this planet, apparently alone."  
  
"Oh bloody hell," someone said. Ford looked at Zaphod in surprise, for it wasn't the kind of thing he expected Zaphod to say. He turned and saw Arthur standing in the doorway.  
  
"Bloody hell what?" said Ford impatiently, still gripping Zaphod's shirt collar firmly.  
  
"Look," said Arthur. Ford followed his gaze to the corner, where Colin sat, sobbing disconsolately. Ford did something very rare, which was to blink.  
  
"Why don't you go talk to him, Arthur?" he suggested. "I'm busy here."  
  
"Fine."  
  
"How do you know him?" Ford demanded, waving the bag of Prangs closer to Zaphod's face.  
  
"Okay, fine. He was an old business partner."  
  
"And?" Ford said.  
  
"We, uh, had a disagreement."  
  
"I see. Did it by any chance involve leaving him alone on a planet called Bert?"  
  
"No, actually," said Zaphod, "that was the mercenaries' idea."  
  
"The mercenaries, Zaphod?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
Ford couldn't get any more out of him. Eventually he let him go, kicking at his leg in exasperation and hitting the chair instead, which only served to anger him more because he ended up stubbing his toe.  
  
"I'm going down to the engine room to see what's wrong," he called to Arthur, who was busy being very puzzled by Colin.  
  
Outside the ship, a very angry, tall, and disconcerting man was attempting to pry the door of the Heart of Gold open with a long bar made of a metal somewhat like iron. He wasn't making much progress.  
  
Eventually he became more frustrated than usual and strolled off up the nearest mountain, intending to shove a rock down its slope and use Bert's extreme gravity to pop the door open (or create a new door in the ship, depending upon his aim). He never got there. 


	3. 3

Arthur idly tapped his fingers against the Heart of Gold's Nutrimatic. Zaphod shoved past him on his way into the engine room.  
"What do you think you're doing, monkeyman?" he demanded, shoving Arthur onto the table the accursed drink machine hunkered on.  
"Nothing," Arthur growled, shoving his hands in his dressing gown pockets and lurching off to find someone more interesting to talk to. "Share and enjoy!" the machine called out behind him, as if he had some intention of doing either, the first of which was a bad idea if you wanted to keep any friends in your life and the second of which was practically an impossibility (though there had been that one cup of tea, Arthur reflected calmly). He ended up in front of Random's door, where he knocked and waited.  
"What?" snarled Random from within.  
"Just seeing how you were doing," called Arthur, a bit too cheerily for his own good.  
"Is this ship going to start moving anytime soon?" she demanded, coming to the door and making a face when she saw who it was.  
"I don't know, ask Ford," Arthur replied and left.

Meanwhile, in the engine room, Ford was beating on the wall with a wrench. Every few seconds he would give a grunt. To Zaphod, this appeared to have very little effect, if any, on the ship. There were some very nice grooves appearing in the wall, but other than that, his efforts appeared futile.  
"Ford..." "Leave me alone. I know exactly what I'm doing." "Yeah, pounding on the wall, as if that's going to have some sort of-" "Shut up! I know what I'm doing!" Ford grumbled, and went back to tinkering with the Golden Bail of Prosperity itself. Suddenly a blue light filled the room, Zaphod screamed like a schoolgirl (as he was wont to do), and Ford went flying backwards into the wall he had previously been pounding on.  
"Welcome to the Heart of Gold," a smooth female voice calmly piled on top of their confusion. "Do not be alarmed-" "Shut up," grunted Ford, or what had previously been Ford and was now a crumpled heap on the floor with a wrench protruding from it. At that precise moment, Colin bumbled in through the open door.  
"I hate you, Ford Prefect," he said calmly and left.  
"Ba...wha...who...er..." Ford said intelligently.  
"Huh? I ju...der...um..." Zaphod added. "Did that robot-?" "Yes. It hates me," Ford said, recovering what was left of his dignity and sang froid (and also a certain wrench) from the floor. "I think we have a problem." "But the ship works! Now we can get off this miserable rathole planet!" Zaphod said, patting him a little too hard on the back with two of his hands. Ford coughed and staggered to his feet.  
"Yeah. Right." He stumbled off toward the kitchen, where, he hoped, he would find a drink or three. He did, but he also found Arthur.

"Hello, monkeyman," he greeted.  
"You too?" Arthur muttered, stabbing listlessly at the steak he had ordered. At that moment on the bridge, Zaphod was experiencing problems. Not the usual sort of problem Zaphod was accustomed to running into, like finding out your girlfriend is your third cousin, or the usual Ford Prefect sort of problem, nor even the problem of discovering the planet you have crash landed on is home to someone your mercenaries "disposed of" a long time ago. This was the sort of problem where a sleek spaceship lands on yours and a tall, grey-green alien walks out of it, insults you, goes back into its spaceship, and leaves. Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged smiled priggishly at Zaphod. "Zaphod Beeblebrox," he intoned.  
"Yeah?" "You are a wad of that which is found between one's toes on the feet of one's head, sauteed lightly in garlic and burnt to a crisp." "Hey, what?" But the alien was gone.  
"Yeah, whatever, man! I think you need to work on your insults, because that SUCKED!" Zaphod yelled after the departing ship and slipped quietly into a drunken stupor, assisted greatly by three Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters he'd left sitting around the night before.

Trillian and Tricia McMillan were arguing.  
"So you're some other version of me?" Tricia demanded.  
"No," Trillian replied, "You're some other version of me. It has to do with the probability of me going back to get my bag or just leaving with Zaphod. When I made the decision to leave, obviously some other me was created." "Whatever," Tricia said. "So how many of me...um, us...were there?" "Who cares?" Trillian said, a bit crassly. "They're all dead now."   
"Where are we going?" asked Arthur.  
"I don't know, go ask Zaphod." Ford slurped at his drink and then sat still, staring in fascination at the tablecloth. It wasn't all that fascinating (just a purple and green floral pattern), but Ford was too drunk to know that. Just then Eddie began speaking to them.  
"Hi everybody! We're headed straight for the third sun of Kakrafoon!" he said in a voice that was far too cheerful for that sort of news.  
"I thought Hotblack's stuntship destroyed Kakrafoon's only sun," Arthur exclaimed, alarmed.  
"Apparently there's three," Ford belched nonchalantly.  
"Not for long," Arthur pointed out. "Can't Zaph steer?" "He's a bit drunk for that," Ford said.  
"And you're not?" Arthur stomped off to steer the ship himself. 


	4. 4

Fenchurch was angry. She was hot, confused, ready to scream, and a lot of other unpleasant emotions which threatened to take over her usual calm demeanor. She was quite a bit more disheveled than usual, and wishing futiley that she and Arthur had never been seperated. She was also on a pink, springy planet devoid of food, which did little to improve her mood. She went ahead and screamed, realized it hadn't helped, and tried it again. Nothing. She was still equally fed up with this bloody planet. She tried it one more time.  
"I wouldn't be doing that if I were you," a voice suggested gently. She whirled around to face the voice's posessor and found more pink springiness greeting her eyes in its nauseating way instead.  
"Why not?" she demanded. "Where are you"  
"Over here," said a young man who emerged from the side of one of the pink springy hills nearby.  
"Oh. Hello." Fenchurch was rather at a loss for words due to the young man's appearance. He had what her American cousin Linda would almost certainly have referred to as ripped abs. Bulging muscles covered most of the rest of him, and a fur loincloth covered little more than was necessary. The thing that bothered Fenchurch was the hot pink tights, studded with rhinestones and unspeakably gaudy.  
"Why are you-" she started, then realized she couldn't think of a satisfactory question and stared helplessly at one of the rhinestones near the man's knee. The rhinestone, like the man, didn't say anything, and didn't say it for an uncomfortably long period of time.  
"You must be new here," he finally said helpfully, and Fenchurch nodded. "Are you hungry?" he added after an awkward pause. She nodded again. He turned silently, and she followed him into the side of the pink hill, a bit apprehensively, but more hungrily than anything else.

Arthur yanked desperately on the Heart of Gold's steering apparatus, which was a mixture of a wheel and something akin to the computer joysticks he remembered from his home planet. He swerved to the left of the giant orange ball which was now taking up most of the viewing screen (as Zaphod insisted on calling it, though Arthur preferred "windscreen" (upon which Ford would tell him to stop being an idiot, there was no wind in space)) and smirked a satisfied smirk.  
"Congratulations!" came Eddie's newest voice from the corner (this one was a cross between a record needle screeching as someone pulls it across the record whilst the record is revolving at twice its normal speed and a dying mosquito). "You've diverted an almost certain catastrophe"  
"No thanks to you," muttered Arthur, shoving his wheeled chair over and pushing the "Other Personalities" button on Eddie's interface panel. "Is this better?" Eddie said in a suave baritone.  
"Much," said Arthur, and went off in search of a cup of tea, regardless of what had happened the last time he'd tried it.

Ford stood amazed by the sight of a very drunk Zaphod. Actually, that's not entirely correct. What amazed him was who was sitting next to him, apparently also very drunk.  
"Random"  
"Yeah?" She hiccuped into her jinann tonnikz and smiled eerily at a point about three feet from his head.  
He slammed the door behind him (inasmuch as one can slam a door that opens and shuts itself) and went white as he heard the sound of a hundred thousand people saying "Wop.

Colin giggled evilly as he bobbed down the dark corridors around the Heart of Gold's engine room.  
"Make a fool of me, will he? Send me to what he assumes is my certain death, will he?" His quiet voice echoed off the walls as he moved along, gurgling delightedly.  
"I think you're going to have some technical difficulties, Mr. Prefect, sir," he said insanely to himself as he began his own highly suspect tinkerings. He had to be careful or he'd be the one that got electrocuted.

"Arthur? What the hell?" demanded Ford as he walked into a large room, the door of which sported the legend "Viewing Room" in Damogran, which did those on the ship little good. They had figured it out for themselves.  
Arthur pressed a button in the overstuffed white armchair-like piece of furniture in which he sat. "What?" he replied testily.  
"What are you doing"  
"Watching a movie"  
"You just about gave me a zarking heart attack with that 'wop' business!" Ford exclaimed.  
"Sorry. Didn't know you had a heart," said Arthur and continued watching the documentary on the vicious Robots of Krikkit.  
"That's really nice," snapped Ford, "coming from someone who would have been vaporized a long time ago without my help"  
"...", said Arthur, busily gaping at the screen.

"Here," said the man in pink tights, breaking off part of the blue, fuzzy cave floor and handing it to her.  
"What?" she said.  
"Eat it," he responded, shoveling mouthfuls into his face with his hands. She watched in disgust and admiration for a moment, then began doing the same with the chunk he'd given her. It wasn't very good, she reflected. The texture was somewhere between a potato and a stick, and the flavor was quite similar to shoe leather, but she was hungry and didn't care.  
"The pink kind is poisonous," said the man around a mouthfull of flooring.  
"What?" shrieked Fenchurch.  
"Very"  
"I ate some of it"  
"I suspect you'll die then," said the loincloth-wearing man calmly, as if he were making an observation about the weather. "Unless, of course, you manage to slay a Twagmork and eat its liver within the next twelve hours or so"  
"Okay then. Lead me to the Twagmorks"  
"It isn't that simple," said the man.  
"It never is"  
"Here." He handed her a long, wicked-looking spear and a pair of boots.  
"What are the boots for?" Fenchurch asked.  
"In case the spear doesn't work"  
"What"  
He sighed. "When you get them wet, they smell horrible," he explained. "Just take them off and hold your breath until the Twagmork collapses. Then put them back on and go for that liver"  
"But"  
"Go! You'll run out of time talking to me!" He gestured toward the back of the cave, which was about the last place Fenchurch wanted to go. It was dark and gloomy and loudly advertised the high spider population.  
"Watch out for the bats," added Mr. Tights behind her. She remembered Arthur's tales of Agrajag and smirked.

Ford slapped Arthur across the face.  
"What was that for?" he demanded, nursing his face with one hand and swinging at Ford with the other. Ford restrained him with difficulty, eventually staring him in the eye and hitting him with every molecule of the distance between Ford and his home. Arthur collapsed, twitching, to the floor.  
"Next time you feel you have to watch this movie," Ford said calmly, crouching down beside him, "be sure to turn down the volume"  
Arthur sobbed like a little girl and nodded.  
"And stop being such a baby," added Zaphod, lurching through the doorway with slightly less grace than a grasshopper with one leg. "So what was all that about the third sun of Kakrafoon?" he added in a tone that made it clear exactly what he thought of the third sun of Kakrafoon, which wasn't really printable.  
"I steered us away from it," Arthur beamed.  
"Yeah right, Monkeyman," Zaphod leered and staggered off.

The Guide had, or rather has, this to say about the vicious Twagmorks of Bpegtar: Stay away from them. If possible, avoid the planet of Bpegtar entirely. It is composed almost exclusively of a pink, fluffy, poisonous material that looks revolting and often causes extreme depression or insanity. The Twagmork and a small bird called the Yarnuk are the only native inhabitants, but due to the planet's proximity to a black hole, which it will soon be sucked into, many space vessels have crash landed there. It also resides in one of the more improbable sectors of the galaxy and is therefore also populated by various other travelers. An explanation for this is currently priority #455599994533462 on the list of Things To Research at the Maxi-Megalon Institute.

"Ford," Arthur said.  
"What?" growled Ford, still angry about the Krikkit robot incident, or the lack thereof.  
"Why is the engine room making that thumping noise"  
"I'll go look"  
Arthur smiled contentedly, rewinding his favorite scene, which he had just missed due to Ford.

WHUMP. WHUMP. WHUMP. Ford leaned into the engine room and almost collapsed laughing. Colin was stuck in the Transdeoptor Alens (as Zaphod insisted on calling it; Ford was rather fond of the term "thingy"), which basically meant he was spinning around rather rapidly, hitting a large mattress-like contraption on the wall about every half second, and being electrocuted constantly.  
"What in the name of zarking fardwarks were you trying to do, you little idiot?" he asked, preparing his best throwing towel.  
"Don't even THINK about it," snarled Colin as he collided with the mattress-thing again.  
"Oh, so you'd rather spin around being electrocuted and crashing into a mattress"  
"It isn't a mattress, it's part of the Transdeop"  
"Yeah, yeah," said Ford. He threw the towel (which he had recently added two lead weights to at either end) with deadly accuracy, knocking Colin from his vicious cycle and throwing him to the floor. Ford sauntered over (he normally stalked, but at this point one would definitely call what he was doing a sort of smug, self-satisfied saunter) and removed his towel from the small robot, who thanked him by crashing into his kneecap repeatedly.  
"Ow!" Ford threw the towel rather viciously this time, catching Colin in mid-charge. "I think someone needs an attitude adjustment," Ford suggested, grinning evilly and pulling a pair of pliers from his pocket. 


End file.
